The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology brings together thirty-eight original essays covering the wide inter-disciplinary field of political sociology.

• Represents the most comprehensive overview available in the field of political sociology

• Covers traditional questions as well as emerging topics including recent debates on gender, citizenship, and political identity

• Includes detailed editorial introduction, abstracts, further reading lists,...

This Reader presents the best published writings of prominent sociologists and political theorists currently working in the field.

This Reader presents the best published writings of prominent sociologists and political theorists currently working in the field.

The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology brings together thirty-eight original essays covering the wide inter-disciplinary field of political sociology.

• Represents the most comprehensive overview available in the field of political sociology

• Covers traditional questions as well as emerging topics including recent debates on gender, citizenship, and political identity

• Includes detailed editorial introduction, abstracts, further reading lists,...

The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratisation in the nineteenth century, and at how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analysed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term 'women' is used as an 'undecidable' in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are...

Explores how crucial cultural politics is to the realization of human rights ideals.

How does culture make a difference to the realisation of human rights in Western states? It is only through cultural politics that human rights may become more than abstract moral ideals, protecting human beings from state violence and advancing protection from starvation and the social destruction of poverty. Using an innovative methodology, this book maps the emergent 'intermestic' human rights field within the US and UK in order to investigate detailed case studies of the cultural politics of human rights. Kate Nash researches how the authority to define human rights is being created...

This fully revised and updated introduction to political sociology incorporates the burgeoning literature on globalization and shows how contemporary politics is linked to cultural issues, social structure and democratizing social action.

• New material on global governance, human rights, global social movements, global media
• New discussion of democracy and democratization
• Clearly lays out what is at stake in deciding between alternatives of cosmopolitanism, imperialism and nationalism
• Includes additional discussion of the importance of studying culture to...

Is Habermas's concept of the public sphere still relevant in an age of globalization, when the transnational flows of people and information have become increasingly intensive and when the nation-state can no longer be taken granted as the natural frame for social and political debate? This is the question posed with characteristic acuity by Nancy Fraser in her influential article 'Transnationalizing the Public Sphere?' Challenging careless uses of the term 'global public sphere', Fraser raises the debate about the nature and role of the public sphere in a global age to a new level. While...

Is Habermas's concept of the public sphere still relevant in an age of globalization, when the transnational flows of people and information have become increasingly intensive and when the nation-state can no longer be taken granted as the natural frame for social and political debate? This is the question posed with characteristic acuity by Nancy Fraser in her influential article 'Transnationalizing the Public Sphere?' Challenging careless uses of the term 'global public sphere', Fraser raises the debate about the nature and role of the public sphere in a global age to a new level. While...